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Having iPhone 4S battery problems? Here are two quick fixes

JP

The iPhone 4S may have seen record sales since its launch a couple of weeks ago, but some new owners are having a few problems — specifically with the battery.

The iPhone 4S may have seen record sales since its launch a couple of weeks ago, but some new owners are having a few problems — specifically with the battery.

Despite Apple reckoning that the iPhone 4S should last for 200 hours (around eight days) when switched on a doing nothing (‘standby’ time), some owners are claiming that their battery drops by about 1% every few minutes and so the smartphone barely lasts a day before needing a recharge.

Although there’s a long message thread about the problem on the Apple support forum, not everyone is seeing the same issue, which makes the cause all the more mysterious. Moreover, it only seems to affect the iPhone 4S and not older iPhones that have also been upgraded to the newest iOS 5 software.

If you’re an iPhone 4S owner seeing similarly short battery life, there are a couple of things you can do that might improve it — at least according to some people who’ve tried them.

First, try disabling the system setting that checks where the iPhone is in order to automatically set its time zone and current time.

Apart from being useless in the UK with our single time zone, the suspicion is there’s a bug in this feature on the iPhone 4S that causes it to check its location far too frequently, draining the battery faster in the process.

To disable this option, go to Settings > General > Location Services and scroll to the bottom of the list to find System Services. Under system services, disable the Setting Time Zone option.

Something else you can try is recalibrating the battery by completely draining it (playing a video or MP3 on repeat will speed this up) so that the iPhone switches itself off, then charging it to 100%.

Apple has reportedly contacted some iPhone 4S owners for more information about their battery problems, so if there is a specific glitch, let’s hope it’s identified and resolved soon.